Advanced SEO

You are master of the keyword. You create 1,000 links with a single tweet. Google engineers ask for your approval before updating their algorithm. You, my friend, are an SEO Expert. Prove it by taking our new SEO Expert Quiz.

Gianluca endeavored to learn more about our industry by analyzing more than 20,000 questions from Moz's Q&A section. Along the way, he discovered quite a bit about what makes for an effective online forum. Today's post covers what he learned.

If a recently filed patent is any clue, Google is now working on major algorithmic changes to measure authority outside of followed links. Find out more about how brand mentions play an increasingly important part in that mix.

How do webmasters really respond to a Google update? Does Google really just penalize sites to encourage AdWords adoption? We unravel the assumptions with historical data to show you how the community-at-large is impacted by a Penguin update.

With certain types of search queries, it may be possible to get rankings and results without having to grind on external links simply by identifying gaps in the content provided by those who currently rank and providing it on your pages. This post describes some of Rand's theories about what Google's doing in content analysis and how marketers may be able to leverage it.

Personalized search results have been around for quite some time, but they've changed so much that we need a new term for them: private search results. This post is a snapshot of what we're seeing today (including +Post Ads), along with guidance for how best to take advantage of the latest trends.

If you haven't already, you should start thinking about how to generate business even if you have no search engine presence. This post has tips to prevent penalties and algorithmic demotions as well as a strategic plan to have in case you lose the organic presence of your website.

Over the past few weeks, while looking into how the Knowledge Graph pulls data for certain sources, I have made a few general observations and have been tracking what, if any, impact certain practices have on the display of information panels.

A few months back, I wrote an article on Moz all about a penalty our web agency received for unnatural links pointing to our website. At first, this was a bit of a shock to the system, but since then, we've learned so much about Google's webmaster guidelines and we've helped lots of companies get their businesses back on track and remove manual penalties associated with their websites.

Here at Moz, our organic traffic has already been at over 50% (not provided) for over a year, and our (not provided) numbers have been hovering around 80% for a while now, so I’ve had some time to mull this over: In a post-keyword world, what is SEO?

Every 2 years, Moz surveys over 100 top industry professionals to compile our biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors. For 2013 we’ve supplemented the survey with real-world correlation data from scientifically examining of over 17,000 keyword search results. We've released some of the 2013 data previously, but not the full set until now. So with great pleasure, I present the complete results of this year's survey and correlation data.

To subdomain or not to subdomain, that is the question. Since my first days in SEO back in 2004, the subfolder vs. subdomain debate has echoed through nearly every site architecture discussion in which I have participated. This post walks through the logistics of a study to provide some resolution.

In August, Zoompf published new research showing a clear correlation between the web performance of "Time to First Byte" and Search Engine ranking. In this article, we explore this topic in more detail, including guidance on how you can improve your Time to First Byte.

With recent posts mentioning the rise of contextual and implicit queries, we are now seeing a deep personalization of search. This takes many forms, and has very real implications for our work as marketers. It's time to break down the silos and see the bigger picture.

Search engines call it different things, but we know they both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google's most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results. Knowing how this works can help our own SEO.

Data is everywhere, if you know how to access it. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a powerful tool for data-driven content marketers, and this post is both an overview and mini-directory of the API world.

If you’re like most SEOs, you spend hours each week reading the latest SEO tactics and search engine tidbits. We spend hours learning, but does 90% of it change what we actually do - that is, the basic work of ranking a web page for search? To lend a hand, let me introduce the 25 Step SEO Master Blueprint.

Battlefield control, offensive weaponry, opponent research, and more; in many ways, SEO can be compared to a real-time strategy video game. In today's post, learn how you can lean on your early gaming roots to benefit your grownup SEO initiatives.

On August 15, 2012, our agency's website (which was in the middle of a complete redesign) was hit with a manual penalty by our friends over at Google. This came completely out of the blue as we're a fairly small agency that has never taken part in any unorthodox link building techniques. Here's the story of what happened, and how we overcame the penalty.

Debates over black-hat vs. white-hat SEO conjure up images of cartoon cowboys and villains, and probably aren't much more useful than children's TV. I think it's time to ask some better questions, and really dig into the strategic and tactical implications behind the hats.

Our industry has seen big changes over the last few years, and with that change has come a shortage of testing. As SEOs and inbound marketers, we need to continue to test to refine our practice, and share our stories with the industry at large in order to move it forward.